Education will be Revolutionized by Deep-Learning-based Artificial Intelligence

I’m thinking about what I would do if I was revamping the state’s school system today.

No expert in education, obviously, but this is the state we’re talking about, they primarily use schooling for propaganda purposes, to produce cog-citizens that will neatly slot into the status-quo for life without questioning the deeper ironies and injustices of our modern existence.

Furthermore, most people going into college today are taking remedial English and math courses just to do current division work, which means high school is being wasted on them.

Undoubtedly, a large reason for this is due to the collective-oriented nature of modern education, where every is slotted into a class where they are either on par with, above, or below the expected class average. The people worst served by this are the upper and lower fifth whom are either able to soar past their grade, if they had the chance, or whom require help to catch up to their grade and are at risk of being left behind.

If we can indulge in a moment of science fiction that is very nearly a reality, what would schooling look like if we had the manpower to devote a teacher to every single student. Could we turn the world into millions of John Stuart Mills? Mills famously having been given the world’s greatest education of his day, literally from childhood. And perhaps more importantly, what ramifications would that have on the world?

The science fiction is that such an outcome is achievable if we begin to use artificial-intelligence to offer custom education planning tailored to each individual.

Instead of having classes, you simply result in tracks that students can complete at their own pace.

Growing up, my church had a private schooling course with several dozen students that operated in this manner, using single-track material the student walked through as they willed, in a largely self-study manner. I never partook (perhaps unfortunately!) but I knew those who did.

I was involved in a private teaching system called Kumon which is still around today afaik, which offers accelerated math training using teaching methods favored in Asia–and I can report that it was enormously effective and though I only took it for about two years, it created in me math skills that leave me well above the norm as an adult.

So what would a world of John Stuart Mills-style educated students look like? How far are we from being able to create artificial intelligences that could track individual educational progress in this manner? Surely this is something that would be worth doing in an ancap society, and probably something that the vast majority of people would absolutely go nuts for their children to take advantage of, and is thus a differentiator our ancap society can offer to them, but we’ve got to make it work.

And, to return to my original question, since high school and college have been dumbed down so much–I have heard anecdotally that obtaining a college degree in 1900 – 1950 was extraordinarily harder–could we with an accelerated learning course turn high school into college, and turn college into a master’s degree course / PhD, if we had individual tracking of each student on their own accelerated course with 1:1 supervision?

I believe we could. And I believe this kind of future is far closer to being a reality than we currently imagine.

You may be skeptical that artificial intelligence capable of doing this sort of thing is on the near-term horizon, if so you have not kept up with the latest advances in deep-learning based artificial intelligence. To this point I have assumed that you are up to date on this most incredible and important of technologies that is set to change our world.

Here is a brief primer on the 10.0-earthquake that shook the artificial intelligence world only a few years ago.

In 2012, a lay person entered the yearly artificial intelligence competition with a variation on the concept of automatic learning. For a very long time we have had neural-net concepts able to train themselves in what we need them to do. We give them a large data set and then train them of recognition, offering only reinforcement or not if they get the question right or not.

Questions might take any form, but popular forms currently are things like this, is there a dog in this photo? Or is this word in this audio clip? Things that are data rich, like the human mind is able to easily deal with but computers, thus far, were not.

In 2012, this guy entered a competition with a deep-learning system, meaning it had several layers of training. Normally this would slow things down considerably, so he used an off-the-shelf Nvidia GPU to speed the calculations up, and this made all the difference.

For decades, researchers in artificial intelligence were hand-crafting algorithms to recognize objects and audio, etc., etc. and had hit the 70% recognition wall, which seemed insurmountable.

The earthquake was that this person, who won the competition and changed the world that day, produced a system capable of visual identification at a greater than 90% accuracy, a feat that had not previously been achieved after all those decades of research.

Since then there has been an explosion in deep learning systems, and just last year Microsoft announced their DL audio-system had surpassed human beings in its capability of translating audio to text, at 97% accuracy.

This is why if you have a cellphone capable of understanding speech, there is undoubtedly today a deep-learning system on the other end of that system figuring out what you are saying.

(And, as an aside, this likely also means that this event has not been ignored by the US government, which now undoubtedly has the capability to listen to every conversation in the world that occurs within a few feet of a microphone and render it into searchable text…)

Nvidia, the world’s leading GPU maker, upon realizing what was happening in this field, set about creating an deep-learning purpose-built GPU, and developed something called the DGX-1, billed as the world’s first deep-learning super-computer in a box, with eight DL-chips in parallel, doing in days what previously took months on old systems.

These came out this year and instantly shipped around the world to the top research labs. (Undoubtedly the US gov will be a customer as well).

One major customer was Tesla, whom asked how many of these DL-processors would be needed for fully-autonomous self-driving cars, and the answer was three. So Tesla struck a deal with Nvidia, there are three DL-processors on every Tesla vehicle coming off the production lines *right now*. Every Tesla car made this year and hereafter will be capable of fully-autonomous self-driving in 2017. I mean the kind of self-driving where you go to sleep and your car wakes you up when you’re there.

Thus, it is not at all unthinkable to imagine that just a single one of these systems could oversee all of the students at a single, or several, elementary schools. The system could idle when the student is doing their own work and only needs to be aware when the student addresses the teaching-AI in order to receive feedback on answers or ask for help.

The system will be capable of understanding what students say in a similar manner as has been predicted on many scifi shows such as Star Trek and the like–that now exists.

The system could then very simply walk students through the steps needed. It can read their handwriting, etc., etc.

AI-Teaching would be perhaps more difficult in the more abstract subjects like quality of prose or poetry. But this is not to say that human-teachers will be done away with, rather they may become more like administrators and physical-control of the grounds and students.

There is also the danger that the state might try to create its own version of this system–though institutional inertia means that we have a much better chance of building it before they do. But such a system could in theory be used to create even deeper indoctrination as well.

We must end the state, break free of its false strictures, and free the minds of humanity. This will be a great help to make that happen, if we can leverage it. And make no mistake, this is something we could do, and indeed must do. And since we understand what the masses do not, it is virtually our duty to lead the way.

And heck, we can grow rich doing it, because great education is a highly desired market service. I love it when an ancap objective can be mated with a profitable company concept, that seems to me to be the true way forward for us, because by that means we can mobilize ourselves on a full-time, purpose-driven basis.

I hope one of you with a passion for and the skills to create an AI-education system of this type may begin working on this one-day soon, so that when our ancap region floating on the sea is available and families begin pouring in, we can offer a world-class education along with no-taxation and the other amazing benefits of an ancap society.

… most people going into college today are taking remedial English and math courses …

Your discussion of voice recognition and similar tech is interesting, but frankly, I doubt that educational technology will solve this problem any time soon.

More students take remedial courses in college, and the sorry state of K-12 education presumably has something to do with it, but increased college attendance seems more significant. The percentage of people attending college has doubled since the seventies. Comparing today’s college students to their counterparts in the sixties is comparing the 70th percentile and above to the 85th percentile and above. It’s an apples to oranges comparison, and polishing the apples with high technology won’t turn them into oranges.

If throwing more money at human teachers over the decades hasn’t brought today’s 70th percentile up to the level of the 85th percentile decades ago, throwing more money at mechanical teachers won’t either. It’s about the wetware behind the eyes, not the hardware before them, and the wetware is not improving at anything like the rate of the hardware, if it’s improving at all.

” … most people going into college today are taking remedial English and math courses …”

We first need to distinguish the difference between training and education. Education has been conflated with the former for almost 100 years around the world(Prussian model). Learning Latin and Greek were considered essential for formative studies. Now English has to be taught over and over.

Yeah, I see no reason why that cannot replace traditional schooling to a large degree today, creating an individualized education course that people pursue under the supervision of an AI, rather than moving forward with the kind of one-size-fits-all education we have today, where classrooms teach to the lowest common denominator in a group setting. I know some countries do the opposite, teach to the highest denominator and expect others to catch up, and perhaps that is better in some ways, but also not ideal.